"Living day by day with elephants," Croke writes, Williams "absorbed their deeper more philosophical cues. In fact, he discovered in them the virtues he would work to develop in himself: courage, loyalty, the ability to trust (and the good sense to know when to be distrustful), fairness, patience, diligence, kindness and humor." In fact, Williams once told a reporter that he'd "learned more about life from elephants than I ever did from human beings."